The Artistry of Mixing Drinks
Paris, Fryam Press, 1936. Meier, Frank. The Artistry of Mixing Drinks. [FIRST EDITION] Fryam Press: Paris, 1936. 4to (195x145mm) colour illust stiff card wrappers, [2],182pp.
Second-hand softcover
MEIER, Frank (1884 - 1947)
The Artistry of Mixing Drinks
Paris : The Fryam Press¹, 1 October 1936. First edition. One of 700 copies on cream vellum (from the total edition of 1026), out-of-series. Printed by Bishop & Sons, Paris. In English
Quarto (195x145mm) publisher's gold and green illustrated, cream coloured stiff card wrappers, heavy cream paper, flush untrimmed edges, double column text printed black and red, with a red border of the author's monogram 'FM', [2],182pp. Numerous monochrome Art-deco style illustrations, wine maps, and twenty-four pages of illustrated advertisements for many of the author's suppliers at the Ritz. Unopened. Wrappers very faintly soiled, spine faintly creased. Text block tight, bright and clean.
¶ Born in Tirol, Austria into a family of innkeepers, Meier was for most of his working life a barman, first in London, then New York, then throughout France and Belgium. After his discharge from the French Foreign Legion at the end of World War I he was employed to run the bar at the highly fashionable, and extremely expensive Ritz Hotel Paris; which he did until 1947.²
Not just a cocktail book, Meier included a chapter with excellent advice on wine regions and vintages, illustrated with elegant maps; a chapter of recipes for sandwiches, canapes and savouries ("Champagne, Sandwiches and an Appetite are things which make an evening pass"); bartending tips and tricks and a miscellany of things only one of the world's most fashionable and successful bartenders could be expected to know to converse on: horse racing, antidotes for poisons, world time zones, nautical mile conversions, the circumference of the earth in feet and miles plus the planet’s surface area, the deepest point in the ocean and the height of Everest; how to calculate the carat weight of a diamond, how to remove stains from an oil painting, how to aid a drowning victim, someone struck by lightning or even bitten by a snake.
Highly collectible and scarce. A near fine unopened copy of one of the most elegantly designed, written and published cocktail books.
§ OCLC records only 13 holdings, all in North America and the UK.
§ Noling p.286; EUVS; not in Gabler.
¹ I.e., self published.
² Wondrich, David & Rothbaum, Noah (ed). The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails. New York : Oxford University Press, 2022 p. 454.
Item #11157
Price: $2,500.00 AUD